SARANAC LAKE, N.Y. — It was bad enough when the lake, usually frozen by mid-December, remained liquid until January, then strained to produce more than a few inches of ice with which to build this village’s cherished annual Ice Palace.

It was worse when the skies declined to provide snow, leaving the organizers of the Saranac Lake Winter Carnival with an image problem — the “Adirondacks’ coolest place,” draped in dead grass and mud — and a quandary: Assuming they could find enough snow to truck into town, should it go to the Ice Palace, where a mixture of water and snow is used to cement the blocks together, or the arctic mini-golf course, whose obstacles are built entirely of snow?

But it was not until the temperatures suffered a two-week quaver, the cold lasting barely long enough for the Ice Palace team to put the blocks in place, that things took a truly glum turn.

“We’re lucky we got as far as we did,” said Dean Baker, the head palace builder, stoic in the face of calamity, “before it melted.”

Much depends on the forecast here in the Adirondacks, where ski resorts are struggling for snow, motels for guests and restaurants for diners. But the weather patterns that brought a 66-degree Christmas to New York City have flummoxed daily life across upstate New York, too, infusing each snowless day with a sense of the surreal.

The snowplows have sat largely quiet. The ice fishers have evacuated the lakes. The long-planned tropical vacations do not seem quite so urgent, even as frigid temperatures are expected to return this week.

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The Lake George Winter Carnival hinges on the freezing of a lake that has so far refused to freeze.CreditNathaniel Brooks for The New York Times

For tourism-dependent upstate areas, this winter has been only the latest slap in a series of climatic indignities, the meteorological equivalent of running up the score. Last winter’s unrelenting polar vortex kept would-be visitors huddled at home. Spring showed up late, and summer only in July. Fall meandered on well into December.

“This could turn into, ‘It’s snowing in mid-June,’” said Greg Coffin, the head technician at Lake Placid Ski and Board. “And this is going to happen again.”

In Buffalo, which habitually vies for the title of New York’s snowiest city, winter was so tardy that the golf courses were open well into December, while a local drive-in movie theater, the Transit Drive-In, took the unprecedented step of staying open into January. Landscapers are landscaping. Outdoor construction crews are not waiting for the thaw.

The first measurable snow came on Dec. 18 — a 0.1-inch smattering that marked the end of the city’s longest snow-free seasonal streak ever — but Lake Erie remains largely unfrozen.

This, remember, is the city where seven feet of snow fell during a single snowstorm in November 2014.

“You won’t see this reported in the national media, but Buffalo, N.Y., is currently in 15th place,” The Buffalo News announced in the last week of January, under a photograph of city residents playing outdoor basketball. “Fifteenth. For winter snowfall.”

Since mid-December, when the Buffalo Nordic Ski Club’s cross-country skiing season was scheduled to begin, there has been enough snow for its members to ski only five times. Mostly, they hike.

“It’s very difficult to keep people happy,” said James Klein, the club’s president. “I’m going to be arrested for fraud, running a cross-country ski club with no snow.”

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Supplies are dropped off at Duffy’s Tavern, where Lake George’s annual outhouse races will be held in the parking lot because the lake has not frozen.CreditNathaniel Brooks for The New York Times

Mr. Klein estimated that he had played golf on a Buffalo course through Dec. 13, wearing no more than a light jacket, and that he had shoveled his drive roughly twice this winter.

At the Transit Drive-In, Rick Cohen, the owner, had had misgivings about a four-week commitment to show “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” from mid-December through mid-January, more than a month later than the drive-in normally stays open. Shovels and plows were never needed, however, and Mr. Cohen turned a small profit.

If it stays mild, Mr. Cohen said, he may reopen as early as Valentine’s Day.

“From a business standpoint,” he said, “I think global warming’s a great thing.”

There are few such silver linings for the Lake George Winter Carnival, which hinges on the freezing of a lake that has so far refused to freeze.

The motorcycle and truck races that usually make a noisy spectacle of the iced-over lake are likely to be canceled. The dogs that are supposed to pull children on sleds around the lake will instead be pulling them around a parking lot. The outhouse race, in which teams of five drag wooden port-a-potties on skis across the ice — two pushing, two pulling, one enthroned on the toilet seat — was relocated to the dry land outside Duffy’s Tavern. (For the first time since the race was instituted 20 years ago, the skis were swapped for wheels.)

Naturally, the organizers want to put the best face on things. “There’s no negativity,” said Lou Tokos, a vice chairman of the winter festivities, on which much of the area’s winter tourism business depends. “Everybody’s foaming at the mouth to come here.”

This could be construed as something of a stretch.

“No ice and no snow correct?” one commenter asked on the carnival’s Facebook page.

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Big Tupper, the ski area at Tupper Lake, has no snow-making equipment and has not opened this season.CreditNathaniel Brooks for The New York Times

“Bring a swimsuit,” another advised.

“Absolute sadness,” a third wrote. “But looks like the pub crawl should be a great success with no ice/snow?!?”

With a few weeks’ deep cold, the lake could still freeze up to the foot needed to accommodate motorcycle and truck races, currently scheduled for the last weekend of February. To race on anything thinner would be to court the wrong kind of excitement.

“When you hear the ice just snap,” said Joe Angelo, vice president of the Electric City Riders, which organizes the motorcycle races, “it’s like, ‘Oh, God, I don’t want to swim.’” (He was quick to vouch for the event’s safety, however, assuring a reporter that “we don’t have that many crashes.”)

In Lake Placid, a warm December meant that the normally busy holiday season fell flat, despite special offers and local business groups’ best efforts to inject the snowless town with festive cheer. Cancellations abounded.

“It’s nice that it’s not 40 below zero all the time,” said Charlie Levitz, the owner of Chair 6, a popular local restaurant named for Whiteface Mountain’s highest ski lift. Like many businesses in the area, it relies on winter tourists to help it break even and keep its staff employed through the slow months. “In lots of ways it’s good, but the greater good would be to freeze your butt off,” Mr. Levitz said.

Catamount Ski Area in the Berkshire Mountains, Hunter Mountain in the Catskills, Whiteface Mountain outside Lake Placid and other ski resorts across the state have opened later and offered fewer trails than usual. Most are planning to extend their snow-making operations later than in past years to make up for the long stretches in which it was too warm even for fake snow.

Then there is Big Tupper, the ski area at Tupper Lake, which has no snow-making equipment at all.

“We plan to be open for the 2015-16 ski season; however, we are awaiting Mother Nature’s cooperation,” Big Tupper’s answering machine message says. “Thank you, and think snow!”

A version of this article appears in print on , Section A, Page 18 of the New York edition with the headline: Awaiting Winter’s Arrival Upstate. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe